BACCHANALIA. - Name of a cult that was celebrated in Rome (Livy, XXXIX, 8 ff.), in the lucus Similae (Livy XXXIX, 12, 4; cf. CIL, VI, 9897; Schol. ad Juv., 2, 3), on the slopes of the Aventine (Ovid, Fasti, VI, 518), or in other localities of Italy, especially in the south (cf. CIL, I, 196 = CIL, X, 104; Livy, XXXIX, 41; XL, 19, 9), at the beginning of the 2nd century B.C.
The divinity at the center of the celebrations was Bacchus (Dionysus; [v.]). But not in the form, known to the Latins from most ancient times, of Liber pater, a god, together with Libera, of fertility, and who, from the beginning of the Republic, had formed, together with Libera and Ceres, a triad analogous to the Greek one of Demeter, Dionysus and Kore, but in that form which had found its systematization in the mystery cults (v. DIONISO, MISTERI di). This type of religiosity came from southern Italy; originally the cult was reserved for women (Livy, XXXIX, 13, 8), then, on the part of a Campanian priestess, men had also been introduced into it. (Elsewhere [XXXIX, 8, 3] Livy speaks of a « graecus ignobilis » who brought the bacchanalia from southern Italy to Rome through Etruria). The festivities were secret; probably the killing of the child Dionysus by the Titans was represented there, a ritual death (« ita ut ne corpora quidem interdum ad sepulturam exstarent ») and a kind of mystical rapture among the gods (« raptos a dia homines dici »: Livy, XXXIX, 13, 13).
It was, in substance, a cult of oriental type, with the figure of Dionysus at its center, a cult that had had great prominence at the court of Ptolemy Philopator in Egypt, of a mystical, orgiastic character with an esoteric background, to which the philosophical-religious speculations of the Pythagoreans were perhaps not extraneous. In Rome the bacchanalia, made known following a denunciation motivated by private matters, were severely regarded by the senate — always an enemy of every form of « externa religio » — which, through the consul Postumius Albinus, mounted a veritable political affair, which ended with a bloody repression following the well-known « senatus consultum » of 186. This, while not going so far as a precise interdiction, regulated, notably limiting them, the celebrations of the bacchanalia (the text of the « senatus consultum » — preserved in CIL, VI, 9897 — was rediscovered « in agro Teurano », in Calabria).
The singular historical value of the episode of the bacchanalia consists in the fact that the event represents, as far as is known, the first case on Italian soil of a collision between political and religious power (the investigations into the bacchanalia were carried out by the consul and not by the priestly college).
To justify the sanctions, Livy's account is stuffed with scandalous particulars and accusations of immorality, the same accusations that would later be brought against the Christians.
After the persecution of 186 one must reach the middle of the 1st century B.C. to find mention of the bacchanalia (Serv. ad Verg., Ecl., 5, 29: « Caesarem constat primum sacra Liberi patris transtulisse Romam »). Caesar, who, in all likelihood, had learned the Dionysiac cults in Alexandria in Egypt, reintroduced them in Rome. After him, as the admission of foreign religious forms and religious syncretism progressed during the empire, such cults perpetuated themselves.
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Mario Camozzini